From Robot Controller to Digital Bra-Maker: The Many Hacks of Xbox Kinect

(Dec. 3) -- Three-dimensional video chat. Green screens without a green screen. Sophisticated 3-D-mapping robots. Real-time virtual bras.

This might sound like a rundown of the new gizmos on display at January's Consumer Electronics Showcase, but all of these near-future gadgets are actually available inside a box -- an Xbox.

Microsoft's motion-sensing Kinect camera was designed as a way for gamers to be able to control their Xboxes without a controller, but a legion of enterprising hackers saw no reason to stop there.

The device was built for gaming, but the technology involved isn't exactly child's play. The Kinect functions by beaming thousands of infrared dots throughout the room it's in, allowing it to draw a 3-D map of whatever is in front of it -- then tracking the way a player moves to control what happens in the game.

This sort of technology isn't new, but Kinect has taken what used to be an expensive piece of professional equipment and turned it into a widely available toy. But now that Internet communities of programmers have gotten their hands on it, some hackers are using their Kinects for practical purposes.

Jason Nelson plays in a small indie rock band in Minneapolis, and he'd been looking for a way to operate an arena light show on a scale his band could afford. Before, he had toyed with the notion of using a professional depth camera, but that wasn't too much cheaper than hiring someone to operate the spotlight manually.

"Then this whole Kinect thing came around, and I was looking at some of the hacks, and the depth camera is essentially a laser rangefinder for cheap," he told AOL News. "I said, 'All right, this might be what I need to complete my idea.' "

With a little tinkering, he was able to get the Kinect to tell a spotlight how to follow him on stage, and now he's working on tweaking it so it can process a stage with an entire band on it.

A Massachusetts Institute of Technology student put his Kinect on top of a small robot and controlled it with gesture commands while the bot took a 3-D map of its surroundings.

For others, the Kinect has become an artistic medium. Robert Hodgin developed a program that turns people sitting front of the camera into puffy anthropomorphic marshmallows. Hodgin says that because the Kinect is so good at filtering people out of cluttered or dimly lit environments, it's an ideal tool for installation artists.

It also appears to be an ideal way to create programs that Microsoft would never consider releasing. Right now, the games available for Kinect mostly recognize a player's arms, legs and torso. But what about breasts? Using some creative coding, Dan Wilcox came up with a program that can add a digital bra to any chest in real time.

But for many, the height of sci-fi coolness has always been the ability to fluidly manipulate a computer screen with gestures, "Minority Report"-style. Despite some promising demos, Kinect doesn't quite have the resolution to recognize fingers, and it requires a distance of about 6 feet to work -- a good deal farther than most people sit from their computers.

Other Kinect hacking goals remain elusive, like the ability to use multiple Kinects to make a complete 3-D map of a room. But while some of the basic limitations of the technology will likely show themselves in the future, Kinect hackers have only had their hands on this technology for a few weeks and they've already been able to make applications that are more interesting than what game developers had managed to create in a period of months.

"I feel like Kinect as a device is far more exciting as a scientific hobbyist experimental device than as a gaming device," Nelson said. "I haven't used the games at all."